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Under a Dark Angel's Eye
By opening this book, you've given Patricia Highsmith permission to follow you, catch you, take you apart. Get ready to run' CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
'Every story shimmers like a dark gem as Highsmith turns her gimlet eye on domesticity, suburban madness, toxic families and the loneliness of childhood. Often mordantly funny and always psychologically acute, this collection is not to be missed' MEGAN ABBOTT
INTRODUCED BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
Patricia Highsmith was one of the great twentieth-century fiction writers, celebrated for classics The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train, but she was also a masterful and prolific short-story writer. This definitive new collection, featuring two stories that have never been published before, reveals Highsmith as a genius of the genre. Peerlessly disturbing, exhilarating and savagely funny, Highsmith's stories still have the power to startle, presenting a world that is frighteningly familiar and as relevant today as when they were written.
Includes two newly discovered stories. This is the only volume of Highsmith's stories to select from a lifetime of short-story writing.
'Every story shimmers like a dark gem as Highsmith turns her gimlet eye on domesticity, suburban madness, toxic families and the loneliness of childhood. Often mordantly funny and always psychologically acute, this collection is not to be missed' MEGAN ABBOTT
INTRODUCED BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
Patricia Highsmith was one of the great twentieth-century fiction writers, celebrated for classics The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train, but she was also a masterful and prolific short-story writer. This definitive new collection, featuring two stories that have never been published before, reveals Highsmith as a genius of the genre. Peerlessly disturbing, exhilarating and savagely funny, Highsmith's stories still have the power to startle, presenting a world that is frighteningly familiar and as relevant today as when they were written.
Includes two newly discovered stories. This is the only volume of Highsmith's stories to select from a lifetime of short-story writing.
640 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2021
48 people are currently reading
607 people want to read
About the author
Patricia Highsmith
487 books5,059 followersPatricia Highsmith was an American novelist who is known mainly for her psychological crime thrillers which have led to more than two dozen film adaptations over the years.
She lived with her grandmother, mother and later step-father (her mother divorced her natural father six months before 'Patsy' was born and married Stanley Highsmith) in Fort Worth before moving with her parents to New York in 1927 but returned to live with her grandmother for a year in 1933. Returning to her parents in New York, she attended public schools in New York City and later graduated from Barnard College in 1942.
Shortly after graduation her short story 'The Heroine' was published in the Harper's Bazaar magazine and it was selected as one of the 22 best stories that appeared in American magazines in 1945 and it won the O Henry award for short stories in 1946. She continued to write short stories, many of them comic book stories, and regularly earned herself a weekly $55 pay-check. During this period of her life she lived variously in New York and Mexico.
Her first suspense novel 'Strangers on a Train' published in 1950 was an immediate success with public and critics alike. The novel has been adapted for the screen three times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.
In 1955 her anti-hero Tom Ripley appeared in the splendid 'The Talented Mr Ripley', a book that was awarded the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere as the best foreign mystery novel translated into French in 1957. This book, too, has been the subject of a number of film versions. Ripley appeared again in 'Ripley Under Ground' in 1970, in 'Ripley's Game' in 1974, 'The boy who Followed Ripley' in 1980 and in 'Ripley Under Water' in 1991.
Along with her acclaimed series about Ripley, she wrote 22 novels and eight short story collections plus many other short stories, often macabre, satirical or tinged with black humour. She also wrote one novel, non-mystery, under the name Claire Morgan , plus a work of non-fiction 'Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction' and a co-written book of children's verse, 'Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda'.
She latterly lived in England and France and was more popular in England than in her native United States. Her novel 'Deep Water', 1957, was called by the Sunday Times one of the "most brilliant analyses of psychosis in America" and Julian Symons once wrote of her "Miss Highsmith is the writer who fuses character and plot most successfully ... the most important crime novelist at present in practice." In addition, Michael Dirda observed "Europeans honoured her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus."
She died of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland on 4 February 1995 and her last novel, 'Small g: a Summer Idyll', was published posthumously a month later.
Gerry Wolstenholme
July 2010
She lived with her grandmother, mother and later step-father (her mother divorced her natural father six months before 'Patsy' was born and married Stanley Highsmith) in Fort Worth before moving with her parents to New York in 1927 but returned to live with her grandmother for a year in 1933. Returning to her parents in New York, she attended public schools in New York City and later graduated from Barnard College in 1942.
Shortly after graduation her short story 'The Heroine' was published in the Harper's Bazaar magazine and it was selected as one of the 22 best stories that appeared in American magazines in 1945 and it won the O Henry award for short stories in 1946. She continued to write short stories, many of them comic book stories, and regularly earned herself a weekly $55 pay-check. During this period of her life she lived variously in New York and Mexico.
Her first suspense novel 'Strangers on a Train' published in 1950 was an immediate success with public and critics alike. The novel has been adapted for the screen three times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.
In 1955 her anti-hero Tom Ripley appeared in the splendid 'The Talented Mr Ripley', a book that was awarded the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere as the best foreign mystery novel translated into French in 1957. This book, too, has been the subject of a number of film versions. Ripley appeared again in 'Ripley Under Ground' in 1970, in 'Ripley's Game' in 1974, 'The boy who Followed Ripley' in 1980 and in 'Ripley Under Water' in 1991.
Along with her acclaimed series about Ripley, she wrote 22 novels and eight short story collections plus many other short stories, often macabre, satirical or tinged with black humour. She also wrote one novel, non-mystery, under the name Claire Morgan , plus a work of non-fiction 'Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction' and a co-written book of children's verse, 'Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda'.
She latterly lived in England and France and was more popular in England than in her native United States. Her novel 'Deep Water', 1957, was called by the Sunday Times one of the "most brilliant analyses of psychosis in America" and Julian Symons once wrote of her "Miss Highsmith is the writer who fuses character and plot most successfully ... the most important crime novelist at present in practice." In addition, Michael Dirda observed "Europeans honoured her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus."
She died of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland on 4 February 1995 and her last novel, 'Small g: a Summer Idyll', was published posthumously a month later.
Gerry Wolstenholme
July 2010
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 22, 2023
Apart from the animal tales, God tier.
July 10, 2024
every book of hers that I read, I love her more and more
November 27, 2025
The members of Monty Python hated thinking up ways to end their sketches. When they saw Terry Gilliam's art it seemed as good a non sequitur as anything to smash into the ending of their sketches.
And Patricia Highsmith has a similar trick, where the protagonists will just take their own lives. Which is a pretty big full stop.
This is generally a wonderful collection of short stories. Most end very abruptly (the above trick notwithstanding) and leave you wanting more.What the short story gives with one hand, it takes from the other.
Hopefully everyone who reads this will come away with their own favourite. Mine are the pair of claustrophobic/ Kafkaesque (KAFKAESQUE SIREN) stories set in a Mexican jail and a nuclear waste storage bunker. Just brilliantly inventive and believable.
And Patricia Highsmith has a similar trick, where the protagonists will just take their own lives. Which is a pretty big full stop.
This is generally a wonderful collection of short stories. Most end very abruptly (the above trick notwithstanding) and leave you wanting more.What the short story gives with one hand, it takes from the other.
Hopefully everyone who reads this will come away with their own favourite. Mine are the pair of claustrophobic/ Kafkaesque (KAFKAESQUE SIREN) stories set in a Mexican jail and a nuclear waste storage bunker. Just brilliantly inventive and believable.
January 29, 2022
4* for the half that I read but I didn’t have the motivation or determination to stick with it through the whole anthology. I am challenged in reading large chunks of short stories in one sitting and think this collection might be better savoured over a long time if one had a copy on one’s bookshelf rather than borrowing from a library. Suitably dark for Patricia Highsmith with some wonderfully weird characters including a cockroach as an unlikely but nevertheless likeable protagonist. I think my favourite may have been the Terrapin- a true revenge on a cruel mother.
June 17, 2022
Didn’t care much for the introduction, which read as though it was by someone who didn’t understand Pat Highsmith at all! It made me wonder how representative the selection of stories would be. However, once I started on them Highsmith’s magic took over. I’d read a few before but they were much more varied than I expected. I especially liked those tales told from an animal’s point of view. But ‘The Still Point of the Turning World’ must be the best short story I’ve read. Beautifully written and quietly moving.
I’m with Richard Osman: ‘one of the finest writers in the English language”.
I’m with Richard Osman: ‘one of the finest writers in the English language”.
October 25, 2021
I must admit I didn't read every single story in this 700 page anthology with forward by Carmen Maria Machado but many – and many that stay with me for their dour and dark, yet powerful characters and narratives. Intense, punchy, one gets the sense Highsmith never stopped writing, for perhaps she never quite found the answers to her questions of the source of human depravity.
August 12, 2025
As with any collection of short stories, this one contains the good (if not very good in some case), the bad and the downright ugly (both shockingly good and terminally dull).
However, as no individual story is more than ten pages or so long, nothing remains turgid for long.
Recommended, in particular to fans of Ripley and Strangers on a Train
However, as no individual story is more than ten pages or so long, nothing remains turgid for long.
Recommended, in particular to fans of Ripley and Strangers on a Train
January 22, 2022
Brilliant selection of short stories published to commemorate the centenary of her birth.If you have not read her novels or short stories you have a real treat or shock awaiting you,try them,you will not forget them!
April 21, 2021
Dark and cruel little snapshots of humanity - I loved pretty much all of these! One to check out if you're also a fan of Ruth Rendell's short stories.
August 20, 2021
I love dark humour like these stories. A bit like Chekhov dismal tales of humanity. I'm reading the short stories in between other books
February 23, 2023
Love u Patricia, but this book ain’t it. A few good short stories but defs wasn’t her best work
April 11, 2024
Animal stories were goated baaa
June 30, 2024
That was long and I got a really good grasp of her style. It’s so modern. Every time I’d read the book in public people would ask who she was… crazy to me! It’s Highsmith!!!!
Want to read
September 8, 2024Author recommended by fictional character.
August 21, 2025
Cheering like I’m at a sports game every time the main guy in the story abruptly kills himself on the last page
January 7, 2026
Read about half (up to and including Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie). They are very good but very dark and I’ve had enough for now. May return in future.
February 23, 2021
Excellent writing not a word wasted in these macabre stories.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews